What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

the summer when Jamal was still a baby, was the summer when Carla’s job was to hold on to him, tight, while Angie stepped off the balcony. Angie hadn’t even waited through the whole spring.

They had argued furiously. Carla had covered her ears to block the noise of the fight between her father and her mother. Her father was screaming, “Don’t you ever, ever come to my house and disturb my family again. This is the last time you’ll ever see me, you bitch.”

“You’re not going to get away with this. You liar, you liar, you fucking liar.” Angie’s voice was thick with disgust and love. Then there was only the sound of bodies against walls and fists against flesh; a dresser tumbling down in their bedroom.

“You’re crazy, you’re fucking crazy, let me go.” Her father dragging Angie toward the door, Angie hanging on to her father as he tried to reach the front door. When he got to the door he succeeded in ripping her fingers from his throat and shoving her hard toward the kitchen.

“Fucking bitch, you want to ruin my life, eh? Leave me the fuck alone.”

Angie was whimpering as he slammed the door, then with a kind of roar she grabbed a pot from the sink, flung the door of the apartment open, and sped down the hallway, screaming, “You fucking liar, you shit, I’ll hurt you, you see, you see if I don’t.” The pot ricocheted off the elevator doors, and Angie stood there emptying her lungs with the sound of an enraged wordless scream. Back in the apartment Carla patted a mewling Jamal. He had been awakened by the noise and was fretting. Carla patted him, saying, “Sleep, sleep. Sleep, sleep.”

Angie came in from the hallway, went to the bedroom, and collected Derek’s clothes. She took them to the balcony and threw them over—his gloves, his pants, and his underwear. Then she cleaned the apartment, turning the stereo up to its loudest, scrubbing her hands under the kitchen tap, her face slack-jawed, streaming with tears.

Carla told Jamal this story once, what she recalled, in an attempt to make him understand why he should love someone he never knew and why she was steadfast in her love for Angie. Jamal only understood it in that it deepened his sense of why his father did not love him. Even as the story came out of her mouth, Carla knew this was how he would take it, not as a sedative against their father but as a confirmation of his fears. More and more she found herself unable to console him or to call on anything she actually knew for certain that would help him.

“Maybe she was a bitch, Carla.” He had said the most dreadful thing. She had slapped his already wounded face and strode off. She could not forgive him. Yet she did in the end because he was the best thing that she had of Angie’s.

782 Wellesley Street, apartment 2116. Toronto M6H 5E7. Phone number 962–8741 (when the bill was paid). When Carla was four, Angie had taught her the address through nightly repetition. And her last name—Chiarelli. The building looked slightly shabby now. Worn out. So were her feelings, standing in front of it. Carla sat on the small grassy spot out front. She was suddenly exhausted, from the long walk and from the ride yesterday, from the whole thing. Did it happen the way she remembered it, did it happen at all?

All the way here she had felt childish, as if she was going to tell Angie something. But, of course, Angie Chiarelli wasn’t here and this place was just a nondescript, shabby apartment building, a new set of people going in and out of it; its occupants must have changed several times in the last eighteen years. Whoever lived in apartment 2116 was oblivious to Angie or to her. This was not a home where memories were cultivated, it was an anonymous stack of concrete and glass. There were no signs of Angie’s presence, no old wardrobe, old door buzzer, old dress. The grapevine had been ripped down from the balcony of 2116, the towel and the suntan lotion and the dark glasses Angie bought her were not strewn haphazardly on the floor up there waiting for her. She had overused these memories, wrung everything from them. She could hold them on one page of a notebook. The only way she could make them last was to spool them in a loop running over and over in her brain. The same sentences arranged in different ways. She knew she had probably made up some incidents along the way until they were indistinguishable from the real ones—extensions of them. Had she said, “If Angie were here, this or that could have happened,” and then made it so, melting what should have been with what was?

Sometimes she thought that events could not possibly have happened the way she remembered. How could she recall with such clarity things Angie said, things her father said? Wasn’t she too young to understand? But she did remember. She would swear by it. Love can make you remember. And what she had left, what she could be sure about, was an utter love. When Angie had said it was time for her to go to school, she had spent hours drawing a picture of herself. She gave it to Angie her first morning of kindergarten, saying, “I drew you a picture so you won’t forget my face when I’m gone.” What she was sure about was that this love was steady and deep enough to create itself over and over again.

But 782 Wellesley had become less and less cooperative in that love. Today it stood there indifferent and inhabited by other lives, other worries, other dramas. The building would not register these any more than it had Angie’s. 782 Wellesley was built especially for disavowal—it was incapable of nuance or change or attitude. It was innocent. Carla